Like most people, you’ve probably played around with apps like Apple’s Photo Booth or Snapchat, using face analysis and artificial intelligence to turn yourself into an alien, dog, or cat. If you’re familiar with these apps, you’ve already interacted with facial landmarks.
Facial Landmarks Explained
Figure 1
Facial landmarks are localized points on the human face that can be detected and tracked using machine learning and computer vision algorithms. An example of facial landmarks would be the right corner of the eye, the center of the iris, the boundary of the eye-brows, etc. These landmarks can be localized by finding their 2D coordinates (x,y) or 3D coordinates (x,y,z). Figure 1 illustrates the 209 landmarks of AlgoFace SDK.
These landmarks are very helpful as a building block for face analysis applications such as skin condition analysis where you can localize the position of any issue on the face by analyzing each area separately using the location of the landmarks. Tracking the location of the landmarks through a video from one frame to another can also help to capture facial muscles movements, eyelid blinks and lips movements which can be essential in developing systems such as emotion recognition and driver monitoring.
Facial Landmarks Tracking: How It Works
A facial landmarks tracking system starts by detecting a face in an image or video and doing some primary initialization for the possible locations of each landmark. Then, using facial features capturing and analysis using a machine learning algorithm, the initial location of the landmarks start to converge till they are finally localized accurately at the right place for each one. For videos, the landmarks will be tracked from one frame to another which makes the process faster for real-time applications since the initial guess for the landmarks location for any frame is their final location at the previous frame.
How Organizations Can Benefit from Facial Landmark Detection
Companies can leverage facial landmark detection to gather the data they need to provide the services and products their customers desire the most. For example:
- Facial motion capturing and projecting into avatars to animate.
- Skin conditions analysis.
- Emotion analysis and cognitive state monitoring.
- Tracking a customer’s head pose and eye gaze to evaluate their interest in a specific product.
- Determining whether customers are looking at your videos or other content.
- Detecting how many people are in a space and where they are gravitating within that area.
Facial Landmark Detection with AlgoFace
Facial landmark detection can be used for a number of things, such as to determine where customers are looking, detect the presence of eyewear or a face covering, provide users with virtual try-on solutions, monitor the head positions of drivers, and more.
The good news is these can all be done with AlgoFace’s Face AI enablement engine, one of the most accurate face analysis applications today. With AlgoFace, you get:
- Three times the industry average in terms of points analyzed during face detection. With 209 points and 50 in the eyelids and iris alone, you’re sure to get an accurate reading.
- Support for low-light input. This allows the use of RGB cameras to produce a clear picture even in difficult lighting.
- Precise tracking technology. AlgoFace’s engine can empower technology to accurately track eye gaze and head pose so you have all the information you need.
- Cross-platform: AlgoFace’s SDK works on iOS, Android, C++ for Windows, Linux and MacOS plus JavaScript.
Contact AlgoFace today to learn more about how we can power your business.
